Today I’m answering some of the questions we’re asked frequently:
QUESTION 1:
What’s the difference between “Marketing Automation” and “Lead Generation”?
ANSWER 1:
Marketing Automation is a method to systematically organize ALL your marketing (and sales) activities: from the positioning of your company to the closing of orders, loyalty, etc.
Often for brevity we talk about “Marketing Automation”, but I like to talk about “Sales & Marketing Automation” because I don’t want the two worlds to be seen as separate realities.
Lead generation is one piece of the biggest Marketing Automation puzzle.
In particular, it’s the method for generating potential sales opportunities.
In short, it’s the ideal bridge between Marketing and Sales. In a well-organized company, it should be Marketing that carries on Lead Generation activities, after which Sales take in hand the leads generated by marketing, convert them into negotiations, and close orders.
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QUESTION 2:
What’s the difference between buying a lead generation service and doing it yourself?
ANSWER 2:
When you use a lead generation service, you receive leads as an output, i.e. sales opportunities that you then have to convert into negotiations and then into orders.
When you do it yourself, you create your own method for generating leads.
Neither approach is “better” or “worse” than the other: it depends on how much time and budget you have:
- if you have an available budget but no time, you should focus on a service;
- if you don’t have a budget but you have time to invest, you’re better off with a product;
- if you have neither budget nor time… you’re in a bad way and you should at least get some time to get out of the vortex.
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QUESTION 3:
What’s the difference between Content Marketing and Social Media Marketing?
ANSWER 3:
Content marketing is marketing with content as a raw material, regardless of the media through which we disclose those contents.
In content marketing you can be the “publisher” or the television station, for example by creating your own blog.
Social media is, in fact, a “media”, so social media marketing certainly uses the content, but also other levers such as interaction with users, interactions between users.
In social media marketing the media is social media, so your content hosted in their infrastructure (YouTube channel, Facebook page, etc..).
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